In a San Francisco church, a mid-century saxophonist gazes down from a Byzantine-style icon with a golden halo, venerated by a congregation that uses his music as liturgy. This episode explains how John Coltrane got there. Raised in North Carolina with two grandfathers who were AME Zion ministers, he lost his father, an aunt and both grandfathers within months in the late 1930s, a loss the hosts treat as the earthquake behind his lifelong belief that the right sounds could alter reality. In Philadelphia he heard Charlie Parker in 1945, enlisted in the Navy, and performed as an unofficial guest with an all-white band at Pearl Harbor while scrubbing pots by day.

The episode confronts the paradox of superhuman practice, scales until his lips bled, alongside a heroin addiction that got him fired by Miles Davis, framing the drug as a way to turn down the noise of an obsessive mind. The 1957 cold-turkey withdrawal in his family’s home produced a vow to God to use music as a force for good. From there: rebuilding with Thelonious Monk, the sheets of sound described by critics, the major-third key shifts of Giant Steps compared to gravity changing direction mid-sprint, the classic quartet with McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, the soprano saxophone on My Favorite Things, the 1964 suite A Love Supreme whose final movement recites a written poem syllable by syllable through the horn, the free jazz turn that drove Tyner and Jones out and brought in Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali, the album Om, and his death from liver cancer in 1967 at 40.

• Why the hosts argue Coltrane’s addiction was a coping mechanism rather than a lack of discipline
• What sheets of sound means mechanically: clusters of fives, sevens and elevens at breakneck speed
• How Psalm hides a private prayer in the rhythm of its notes, and why the quartet played the suite live only three times
• The anti-jazz backlash and Coltrane’s view that stopping his evolution would betray his vow
• A posthumous Pulitzer, an interview answer that he hoped to be a saint, and the church that took him at his word